A selection of these works will be exhibited at EASTinternational 2009 in Norwich. A better view of them can be seen on my web site.
These photographs show most of the work that I exibited for the final exhibition of my MFA course at Bath Spa University. They are letterpress printed text on found paper - mainly old prints found in the college workshops and un-used billboard paper.
Um...
(During the last three months of the course I researched, wrote and printed these text posters, in which I am attempting to express some ideas about politics and the world. I had been trying throughout the course to create a political art work that I could claim to be effective, in that it influenced people directly, without any of the ambiguity that I see as a problem in a lot of political art. What I mean by this is that I was dissillusioned by political art, by political philosophy and by politics as a whole(hole). I felt that in all of the art and writing that has been done in the last two hundred years, to dis-establish capitalism, nothing has worked. I know that this comes across as a massive generalisation but I do not mean it like that. I am not aware of everything and I do not want to be, all I see is that nothing seems to have done the job, it might have influenced people to keep trying but they too have failed - capitalism always wins. I know that I am naïve, I do not mind, I am far too young to have anything sensible to say.
I also know that I have failed. I realised as I tried to make the work that this task I had set for myself was not going to be achieved in three months, if at all, and I found that a lot of the writing I was doing at the time, translated through my brain from various political literature into simple statements, which I felt were effective in their own way, was worth printing. I decided to document my developing understanding and it seemed to me that the work I made did something similar to what I had originally been trying to do. These posters seem to make people think, about what the writing means and how they feel about the statement. They want to have conversations about them.
This is hopefully some kind of beginning. I have forty years left to change the world.)